Test Equipment Anonymous

He wouldn't have pinched it. Most of the items are too big and heavy to make that likely and there's too much of it. For an organisation of any size, the value of much surplus equipment (obsolete, beyond economic repair) is not worth thinking about. Attitudes to disposing of surplus equipment vary a...

I've no experience at all of 1T resistors, but I'd imagine there are very respectable insulators with less resistance. I'd have thought producing meaningful results from them was a considerable exercise in advanced practical physics. Things you wouldn't normally consider, such handling them with you...

Unfortunately all of the units I've looked at soo far have had issues like water damage, incomplete repairs of poor quality and critical parts robbed. One had a downright deadly modification of two C14 mains inlets. The original HP one on the back and another one on the side wired in parallel. So a...

There's gold in that thar junk, or so I'm told. I haven't investigated. You may not be that hard up anyway.

Otherwise, Xmas and birthday gifts for nerdy friends, or attention catching bargains if you have a rally stall. You would be doing your bit to avoid e-waste and save the planet.

There was still a fair bit left after I'd filled the back of the car. With price of fuel it would not have been worth my driving there but I had to go within 10 miles for work for a couple of days so not so bad. Might have to go back to the work location next week. That's the main stack. There were...

Things get cheaper and easier to make as technology improves. With test equipment, the big names HPAK, Tek, R&S etc, found what would have been a top end instrument commanding a hefty price in 1970, was pretty much a commodity by 1990. They had to move further up the food chain and offer more ca...

I have KEF C95s I've had for 35 years. They suit me. If they suit you then don't scratch that tickle; it will only turn into an itch. It always struck me that the hi-fi industry was a treadmill. You'd buy something and a year later see endless articles recommending upgrades to the new wonder from y...

Was that near Southampton? may have been the same one... Yes, Crowdhill. Ah you missed the good stuff... ;) There was still a fair bit left after I'd filled the back of the car. With price of fuel it would not have been worth my driving there but I had to go within 10 miles for work for a couple of...

Reminds me, I ought to flog my Rogers Studio 1. No use to me any more :cry: Are you sure? But if you are, sell them now because they are deteriorating all the time. i suppose that's true of all loudspeakers. I have KEF C95s I've had for 35 years. They suit me. The unobtainium ferrofluid tweeters ha...

She knows what a true hoard is. She watches those hoarding shows, both the UK version as well as the US/Canada version. She just likes to bust my balls. :shock: :D She thinks she knows what a true hoard is. She has theoretical notions about hoarding. i doubt she's had to live with one. You have con...

Blondie sez my lab is a hoard. Tell her she's never seen a hoard. From the photos you have a modest and well-ordered collection. I've seen a three story house with the cellar and each floor packed with communication receivers. I bought a couple of them. There was a huge Marconi diversity receiver a...

A success story. A few days diversion and a right result.

I'm glad it worked out. Buying something like that sold as spares or repairs, with a reputation for having an unobtainium part fail, is always going to be a gamble.

I have just made sense of the Keithley 610C circuit diagram. Drawn by a nutter, the input stage (where the unobtainium input MOSFETs are) is upside down with positive rail at the top and negative at the bottom. The unobtainiums are P-channel enhancement MOSFETs. If my £10 610C has destroyed MOSFETs...

At the estate sale on Monday, there was a bookcase, so I had to see what was in it. A copy of the Radio Designer's Handbook still with its original fly cover was tempting, but the book that really caught my eye was "How To Make Better Landings (Revised edition)" I've got a copy of the Rad...

I also remember a case affecting a friend (who Zenith has met). A glider crashed spectacularly, and my friend had recently inspected it and stated it was airworthy. That worried my friend, unsurprisingly. It turned out the pilot had deliberately crashed it to commit suicide. I'd chatted with him on...

I also remember a case affecting a friend (who Zenith has met). A glider crashed spectacularly, and my friend had recently inspected it and stated it was airworthy. That worried my friend, unsurprisingly. It turned out the pilot had deliberately crashed it to commit suicide. I'd chatted with him on...

We have become risk-averse (in order to avoid the cost of accidents), yet have failed to consider that attitude's inevitable consequence. We should consider allowing people who feel they're ready to go to do so before they're screaming inside yet near-comatose on a hospital bed drugged up with morp...

so who broke the first thread? We all did - by reading the posts! Is it broke for good or can it be fixed? Would hate to lose all those posts. Without looking at it in any depth, I would have thought our kind host could set the view count back to zero, and it would be good for another whatever it w...

On a more sympathetic note, I've always felt that a weakness of the state pension is that you don't get a tax-free lump sum. But I would add the caveat that it could only be used to buy something like a > 150hp motorcycle or hang glider that had to be used regularly. Such a feature would save the T...

I know everyone here likes this sort of thing: https://www.futureshop.co.uk/quantum-science-audio-gold-extreme-level-uk-mains-fuse?gad_campaignid=17339270122&gad_source=1 Looks like a standard 13A fuse with a bit of decorative paper wrapped around it... There are some people who are happy to pa...

There are always one or two ebay sellers who offer something like a respectable enough Tek scope for some absurd price, such as £7,000, around 100X what it's likely to sell for. I've no idea what happens, whether people make realistic offers, or they just give up. It might be a listing tactic that p...

Well think about it this way.. Every time you buy an HP 53310A Modulation Domain Analyzer God has to kill a fairy. The description says it's 115V, which I assumed was an auctioneer producing a description for something he didn't have a clue about. The picture of the back shows a voltage selector for...

[Let me know if you go after it. (I'm vaguely interested, and looking for a reason to not get another one). You've got one already. You can't afford it or could spend the money on something else. You haven't got the room for it. It would be a trip and hernia hazard. I'm weak; what more can I say. I...

ISTR being taught in school physics lessons that sparks were ~10kV/cm. Can't find that in my copy of Nelkon's textbook. I'm sure I read that in "Introduction To Atomic Physics" : S. Tolansky. Probably a good enough rule of thumb. It must depend on all sorts of things such as humdity, atmo...